Abstract Paintings and Musings on Art
I think this is the favorite of my recent paintings. I’d love to paint this loose all the time — or looser even. I don’t know why it doesn’t always seem possible. Constitutionally predisposed to tightness, I fear…
This painting is sort of an experiment in soft and broken colors, and I do love the palette. I hope to do more in soft tones like this in the future.
Here’s another new painting that started out quite differently than it ended up. This one took about a week to resolve; and I was working on it during the time Hurricane Isaac was building in the Gulf Coast, so I guess you could say that became an influence. 😉
Even though I scraped lots of paint off of this several times while in the process of creation, it still has lots of wonderfully gooey paint on it (dry to the touch now, of course).
I got a bit bolder with the colors in this painting. This was intended to be a continuation of the same visual idea from the painting I posted yesterday. The fact that it doesn’t quite seem to be is proof of something, but what exactly, I’m not sure. Another goofy composition, but I love it!
It may be hard to believe, but this little painting took about a week. It started out vertical, with less stuff, but even goofier than this, and it just took that long to resolve the composition to my liking.
Once I got it to this point, I was thrilled, and thought, “Oh, this is it! This will be my new signature style!”
Tune in tomorrow to see whether I was right or not. 😉
In this piece, I was aiming to create a painting with some nice space in it (and I do like the space here). Then it got goofy. I do like the way the wobbly stack of shapes in the lower left quadrant serves as a counterpoint to elegant cloud-like forms.
I haven’t posted in a while, but I have been painting. I have about 12 new paintings to share; here is the first of my new series of abstracts that I have been working on since July.
I began this one inspired by passion flowers (we have a huge vine of small passion flowers in our yard). I started this in acrylic, as my previous painting, “Food Forest,” was done in acrylic and I was so happy (eventually) with both the process and the end result.
With this one, however, I found working in acrylic as frustrating as is usually the case for me. So I repainted the whole thing in oil and then ended up painting out much of what had been part of the original composition. I finally abandoned the idea of a passionflower, and let the painting tell me what it wanted to be. And this is the result.
Kind of goofy, kind of beautiful, and I find myself loving the parts but wondering about the whole. This painting got juicier and juicier as I simplified, simplified, simplified.
This painting is available in my shop now: http://marilynfenn.com/shop/the-cosmos-made-conscious/
I started this painting last week, based on the sketch below. The sketch itself is based on a sculpture in tan canvas and black wire by one of my favorite sculptors, Lee Bontecou.
I haven’t really developed a set way to get started with the work I’ve been doing for the past 6 months. I usually have a period of getting very lost while developing my composition, and then have to paint my way out.
This time, I came up with some sketches to serve as the basis for the paintings’ compositions. (I have another one planned as well). Then, I give myself the freedom to allow other things to occur as I work. I may also try another, larger version of this, based on a more accurate interpretation of the sketch.
“Woman Chained” – a gift from the muse…
I’m not used to having a complete idea for a painting when I start to work. And coming up with abstract compositions, for me, is still much more challenging than painting a representational work, where I just paint what I see. Working abstractly is usually much more a process of discovery of the image.
Not so with this, my latest painting, which was started and almost completed in about half-a-day one Sunday. It is kind of amazing to me that an abstract painting this size — 24″ x 24″ — could be done so quickly. Many of my paintings that are 1/4 or 1/8 the size of this tend to present much more of a struggle and can take days or weeks to create.
With this one, the basic idea came to me early one Sunday afternoon, and by late afternoon, I had filled out my concept for how the rest of it would go. Then it was just a matter of sketching the basic structure on canvas, and then painting it. I did spend a couple of nights making some adjustments to it, but still to me, this is speed painting! In some ways, painting this was similar to painting a representational work, as I already knew what went where, and then it was just a matter of doing it.
There’s a barbeque joint in downtown Austin called House Park Bar-B-Q whose motto is “Needs no teef to eat my beef.” This title is a play on that motto, and also refers back to my last painting. Hope you like!